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Visual Artists' News Sheet | November – December 2018
Project Profile
Helen Cammock, The Long Note, 2018, single channel, 103 mins, video still; all images courtesy of the artist and Void Gallery
The Long Note SARA GREAVU INTERVIEWS HELEN CAMMOCK ABOUT HER NEW FILM COMMISSION FOR VOID GALLERY, DERRY.
THIS YEAR MARKS the 50th anniversary of a key civil rights march in Derry that took place on 5 October 1968, calling for the right to vote and an end to gerrymandering and discrimination in housing. This march, and its suppression by the state, is often cited as the galvanising moment of the civil rights movement, and as the starting point of the political conflict that dominated the next 30 years. In the days and weeks before the 50th anniversary, a range of events were organised by a wide spectrum of political groups and by a number of local cultural institutions. These included talks, screenings, exhibitions, rallies and two separate commemorative marches. On the anniversary itself, Helen Cammock’s exhibition, ‘The Long Note’, opened in Void Gallery, featuring a newly commissioned video work, The Long Note, centring on the role of women in the civil rights movement. This is shown alongside Cammock’s video and text-based print series, Shouting in Whispers (2017) and a reading area comprising a range of research material. Combining interviews, archival footage, text, video, song and voiceover, The Long Note strikes a reflective tone, moving beyond a straight re-insertion of women into the historical narrative, touching lightly on issues of gendered historiography, the mechanisms of erasure, and the fallibility of collective memory. A mix of archive and new interviews (with known and less-known figures from the period) conveys both vigorous personal mythmaking and nuanced discussions of the different, often collaborative, ways that women organised - and the invisible reproductive labour of resistance and revolution. In the months leading up to the 1968 commemorations, Bernadette Devlin McAliskey – a significant representative of the civil rights era who is threaded through the layered narrative of The Long Note – commented that
“… those claiming bragging rights from 1968 might reflect with greater humility on the price paid against the degree of progress made since that first march and examine their actual contribution to the reality of 2018”.1 When we look back to this lost moment of revolutionary potential, projects like The Long Note can point to some of the mistakes, oversights and invisibilities that led to the failures of the present – but perhaps they can also signpost us to their redress. I interviewed Helen on 5 October to discuss some of these ideas. Sara Greavu: What did you bring with you into this project from previous work, in terms of methods or approach? Helen Cammock: I guess the beginning was the conversation that I had with Mary Cremin [Director of Void Gallery]. Generally, I work on research or ideas that come from my experience or things that I’ve been affected by. So, in a way, this is not a film I would ever have made, unless somebody had approached me, because I would feel that, potentially, it wasn’t my place to do it. I couldn’t make it in the same way that I’d made other films, because I wasn’t talking about my own experience and I wasn’t talking generationally about experiences of people with whom I share a heritage. I had to take myself out of it much more than I have done in any other film I’ve ever made. SG: Many of the women you interview are drawing on equivalencies and solidarities with the Black British experience. Was this something you were expecting to find so strongly represented? HC: Absolutely, yes. My dad was born in Cuba, coming from a Jamaican family. He came to the UK in the Second World War and he understood what oppression meant. He was eight
